Form and Deconstruction

As usual – the bling – like the back of a lady’s leg – I’m interested. Zude is like that. I simply found a passion. That should not stop other functions. It simply makes me part of the audience. The demonstration I just happen to read about. Demonstration award winner somewhere on the West Coast got me to see its basic operation. The open and inviting staff that listened to my questions - that is well and good.

Branding was the next piece added. My life as Art, themed as the organizing scheme still keeping open to other possibilities. The clincher was daring to choose Deconstruction, (thinking not of the literary but of the racial and political fragmentation engendered when it is an open question “Is Barak Obama Black Enough?” This conversation then applied on both my relationship to the greater African American community and to my children of “mixed” marriage: Black Baptist to Irish Catholic – it’s my question too.

Then came Zude – the form. The possibilities of an open platform - Hyper Media - graphic, text, sound and video - “mourceau” - a bit, piece, morsel, fragment, musical composition; snack, mouthful. This mourceau, adds Derrida is always detached, as its name indicates and so you do not forget it, with the “teeth,” and these teeth, Ulmer explains, refer to “quotation marks, brackets, parentheses: when language is cited (put between quotations marks), the effect is that of releasing the grasp or hold of a controlling context” is truly within reach.

Now I’m forced to theorize notions of hypertext - playing form to de-center meaning making - active reading - co-valuing are now the subject that being Dubois’s “vision seekers” makes the effort all that more important: both fundamentally American and Not. A derivative of a “Strange Fruit”. But how?

 

Four theorists of differing stripes agree - A paradigm shift suggests George Landow in “Hypertext 3.0 - Critical Theory and New Media in an Era of Globalization”: Jacques Derrida, Theodor Nelson, Roland Barthes and Andries van Dam. They argue that we must abandon conceptual systems founded on ideas of center, margin, hierarchy, and linearity and replace them by ones of multilinearity, nodes, links, and networks. Almost all parties to this paradigm shift, which marks, revolution in human thought, see electronic writing as a direct response to the strengths and weaknesses of the printed book. This response has profound implications for some specific elements of thought production - marketing, politics, literature, education and their distribution techniques. The very nexus of social networks and culture creation. A livelihood in the making. What better reason to understand, study, and execute than by mastering Zude.

The features of Zude’s openness – this Switzerland, many sources of content, fortune and time are in sufficient amounts to produce and drive several processes. The major outcome will be audience and their participation in meaning making. My aim brings many others into the conversations of race, gender, privacy, distribution, happiness and addiction. Then to my coaching practice. This is what Barthes describes as an ideal text, where there is a “…galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifies; it has no beginning; it is reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can be authoritatively declared to be the main one; the codes it mobilizes extend as far as the eye can reach, they are indeterminable…: the systems of meaning can take over this absolutely plural text, but their number is never closed, based as it is on the infinity of language.

You’re the reason I do this. This reconfiguring of the notion of author is the world I want to live. I want people daring to reframe the world they live. How does this sound to you? This is an invitation.

Step Two – The Art of Me in Zude

It’s more than a notion – building your brand in a virtual world. If I was building it for Corporation – I’d arrange a retreat where I would have an expensive facilitator conduct brain storming exercises to tease out some of the important concepts needed be expressed. Then, I would turn the project over to a project manager and a team of designers, writers and programmers that would be charged with developing a draft by a specific date – you get the idea.

Not so, this is much more personal. Not only do I not have the resources to engage in such a process, in some ways this is my fun that I want – need to master – because it’s me I want lay out on the screen. I still have the audience of one in mind – that stranger – that has no idea what I’m about, but gets drawn by some search engine or one off comment of a friend or through reading one of the post written about Zude.

If you read any of the reviews of Zude and there have been several: Terri Wells of SEOCHAT, David Berlind of ZDNET plus several others all tell about Zude’s team at 5g and the technology. Interesting stuff – revolutionary – gets thrown around many times in its discussion. If you want to know that kind of stuff, the guy that knows is Matt Wulkan – Director of Product Marketing. I’ve been real fortunate because when I asked a question – new people even more impressive than the last person I spoke with shows up. But I’ll spend more time focusing on the Zude team at another time

Today it’s about one of the Art Themes: Deconstruction. It’s the most difficult to explain.

“Deconstruction is in fact much closer to the original meaning of the word ‘analysis’ itself, which etymologically means “to undo” — a virtual synonym for “to de-construct.” … If anything is destroyed in a deconstructive reading, it is not the text, but the claim to unequivocal domination of one mode of signifying over another. A deconstructive reading is a reading which analyzes the specificity of a text’s critical difference from itself.”

Each image (6) was chosen to express a facet of a self analysis. There’s the multi colored Cow like those that littered Chicago’s Loop; the Male Afro Mask with brackets and other hardware and scraps taped to picture; a faceless torso with its gut split open and his face black out with a message stating “business as usual” where the face should be; a book cover with two long haired scholars – its title is “Stupidity”; there is a large multi colored scene that reminds me of a construction site; and lastly there is a abstract that looks something like a start burst.

Then there are two other elements: the video of Jacques Derrida – the French philosopher that has used the term Deconstruction throughout his work thus far; and forum titled Happiness Addiction. These are all the pieces that are in place. I will also had several others – music most of electric acid type – the Tied Tickled Trio; The Cinematic Orchestra or others. Then there will be a series of rotating essays – post that confront different subjects: politics – “How Black does Obama need be”, The future of being “Grey” – don’t worry they are intended for a audience that like post modern lit – Crit kind of stuff.

The point of deconstruction is that there is no point – it’s lost while being overdetermined.

In Network - Does Life Matter - A LinkedIn question

To Be or Not To Be – Rays question on Linkedin

 

Linkedin is a place where it is ok and fitting to explore ideas for career development purposes that occasionally reflect on what I am Being when I join a social network. Ray’s question and the structure of how he invites the community to engage with his discussion of physics and particles is a phenomenological view of existence. Unlike other views that might emanate from an existentialist or structuralist view which would take an all together different directions. It required that I answer, nonetheless.

My reason for opening a online clinic that offers counseling services is that reality is perfectible for those that admit to addictions in one way or other. I refer you to my piece describing “Authentic Leadership”. In it I confess my belief in Jesus Christ. I see through his life, death and resurrection a world that is “becoming”. The divine NOW is where God continues to demonstrate is might deeds. The issue that Ray is posing is very import in context: “does life matter.” Therefore, I have to speak in the affirmative. It matters as a promise: Grace.

In Authentic Leadership I also engage the arguments against such a view as mine - for your inspection. So I’ll simply suggest that vagueness is a large part of existence so that Grace itself is framed as a paradox. The point of this exploration is only to play with or juggle these ideas because it helps inform our combined mental activity. Some say the brain needs stimulation like our arms.

So we are going consider Grace as no longer a theoretical fiction. As soon as it functions it offends or reconciles, attracts or repeals, breaks, dissociates, unites or reunites; it cannot help but liberate and enslave. Even before prescribing, suggesting a future, saying what must be done, even before exhorting or merely sounding an alarm, Grace, at the level of its existence, in its very dawning is in itself an action–a perilous act

This expectation reflects the social complexity of pluralistic societies that hold ends. Pluralistic societies are torn by deep disagreements over questions of science and morality; they are overburdened by conflicting definitions of the good or virtuous life (or society). The concept of pluralistic sensitivity requires existence to respect the cultural idiosyncrasies of the different communities and discourses comprising the society in which it operates.

These two visions of fairness are, I argue, incongruent. They are incongruent because we know of no way to communicate with existence to learn that it has at its disposal some meta-principle, which can be invoked to resolve any possible social dilemma while satisfying the requirements of both coherence and pluralistic sensitivity. So each of us must in the end confess some oath to some vagueness.

The philosophical debate regarding the notion of vagueness involves further questions, on which I do not intend to comment - this is a post not a book.

Scanning nonetheless - First, some writers argue that vagueness is an epistemic condition that reflects the ignorance of the observer of the true state of things, while others claim that vagueness is an intrinsic attribute of language, which has nothing to do with ignorance.

While I am inclined toward the second view, I do not think this debate has much influence on the argument of this post.

Another important question is whether vagueness is only a feature of claims or representations, or whether it may also be a feature of the world itself or not.

This condition of Grace means we ARE because we fret over it. We give reality a collective conspiratorial boost in that we make ambiguity a condition of history (what has happen), of intentions (unclear preferences-what do I want), of technology (unclear means-ends relations), and of organization (fluid participation.

It therefore gives reason to believe how important it is to know why individuals pay attention to some stimuli, at the expense of others. This is a matter of rules of the “promise” in the shaping. Individuals will not act according to a goal-based logic of consequence–they will not ask, what are my prefaces, what are my alternatives? They will apply a rule-bound logic of appropriateness instead. They will ask, what kind of situation is this? Who am I? (what is my identity?), who are we? (what is our identity?) and what is appropriate for me/us to do?